


Three Black Feathers

by paperclipbitch



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Canon Era, Domestic, F/M, Fic Exchange, Gen, Ghosts, Married Couple, Married Life, Mostly Fluff, Trick or Treat 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-24
Updated: 2015-10-24
Packaged: 2018-04-27 23:31:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5069095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Jonathan,” Arabella says, “I allow you many liberties that other wives would have nipped in the bud in the first months of marriage, but I will not have ghosts at my breakfast table.”</p>
<p>-- or, the one where having a magician for a husband plays havoc with one's domestic arrangements.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Black Feathers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [metonymy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/metonymy/gifts).



> [Title is a Bella Hardy song] Written for the Trick or Treat exchange; **metonymy** mentioned both Arabella  & Jonathan's home life, and ghosts, in their prompt, so I decided to combine trick _and_ treat a little and have both!
> 
> Set handwavily somewhere in the earlier part of their marriage; I've not done much period research, or tried period dialogue, but it shouldn't be all too jarring, forgive a lazy author.

**i.**

Arabella has never been particularly good at being sprightly and talkative in the mornings, and so she finds the quiet of her married breakfast table a relief. She can read correspondence, and flick idly through the newspaper, and sip her tea, and there is no need to make conversation or pretend wakefulness. Jonathan is usually wild-eyed and wild-haired, flipping back and forth through his papers and books, occasionally murmuring something to himself, making careful gestures over his coffee cup and then peering into it. Arabella occasionally thinks about suggesting that Jonathan not bewitch his breakfast, but she’s not the one who has to drink it afterwards. Her husband frowns and mutters and puts his elbow in the marmalade dish and scribbles notations on anything to hand, frequently including the tablecloth, and Arabella lets him do it because she doesn’t really mind, and because from time to time he looks up from his work and sees her and his eyes widen in a sort of delighted surprise, as though he wasn’t expecting her to be the wife at his breakfast table, but he’s so glad that she is.

On the whole, it isn’t so bad being married to a magician; and Jonathan himself makes up for the parts of it that make her mouth thin, and endless discussions with their housekeeper on how to get ink out of tablecloths.

This morning, however, Arabella looks up from her tea and a letter from a cousin she’s never particularly liked, and finds that there’s a spectral figure in the centre of her dining table, floating morosely above the baked ham.

Arabella wasn’t much of a woman for screaming and fits of the vapours even before she acquired a husband who dabbles in the terrifying for his day to day living, so she reacts in as dignified a manner as she can; placing her teacup back in its saucer with one only slightly trembling hand, smoothing her fingers over the napkin placed in her lap, and saying, in a voice that only cracks a little: “Jonathan, dearest?”

She gets a hum from her distracted husband, who has ink on the tip of his nose and hasn’t noticed, and most of the time Arabella finds that endearing, although not right now.

“Jonathan,” she says again, sharper, “I allow you many liberties that other wives would have nipped in the bud in the first months of marriage, but I will not have ghosts at my breakfast table.”

The ghost turns its limpid, hollow eyes to her; Arabella ignores what might be an expression of reproach, because she refuses to apologise to a spectre that has arrived uninvited in the middle of a private meal. A shred of school arises in her brain; she swallows down the urge to tell the ghost not to shake its gory locks at her. For one thing, that seems rather melodramatic for what is currently a very peaceful situation, and for another, the ghost doesn’t _have_ gory locks; they are tidy, if a little bedraggled, and arranged in a style at least a century out of date.

Jonathan finally deigns to raise his head, a sleepy look in his eyes, though that’s dispelled a moment later when he catches sight of their unexpected guest.

“…you can see that?” he says, and the corner of his mouth is ticking sheepish. 

“Am I to understand, Jonathan, that this is something of a regular occurrence?” she asks, sharp, the voice she saves for when he has incinerated another pair of curtains.

“Well, regularity, is, you know, something of a difficult thing to measure-” Jonathan begins, and then sees the sceptical turn of her expression, and sighs: “yes, frequently, my dear.”

Arabella isn’t sure what to make of the fact that she can see ghosts now where she could not see them before. She decides she’ll perhaps mull it over at a different time of day, when she is more awake and perhaps better equipped to deal with it all.

“I will assume that means it isn’t harmful,” Arabella says, and Jonathan nods furiously, whether because it’s actually true or because he doesn’t want her to be angry with him, she is unsure. “However, it will not do, it is somewhat putting me off my toast, you understand.”

Jonathan nods, and makes a complicated little sign in the air, and says, in a genial tone: “…if you would, Horace?”

The ghost sighs – not the moaning, groaning sigh of tawdry novels, but something that is more of a put-upon huff – and sails upwards to disappear through the ceiling.

“Better?” Jonathan asks.

Arabella considers a range of answers, but finally settles on: “yes. Better.”

**ii.**

“Are you much given to the habit of summoning spirits?” Arabella asks one evening, when they are both before a crackling fire, the perfect atmosphere for the kind of chilling stories Henry used to like to tell her, sneaking a cold fingertip down her spine at the most terrifying moments to make her jump. Arabella does not scare so easily these days, and in any case when Henry was telling her those stories it was at a time when there was believed to be no magic in England; now that there is, that her own husband is a magician, the things that scare Arabella are somewhat different in nature.

She has her knitting to keep her hands busy and to at least make her look like the sort of wife she is expected to be, and Jonathan has several sheaves of paper and a peacock feather whose purpose he has not attempted to explain; he taps it against his chin from time to time, but it seems more idleness than any real magical intention.

Jonathan hums thoughtfully over the question, as though giving it serious thought; that, in itself, is something of a poor omen, Arabella reflects.

“Summoning them is often quite difficult and even more often a waste of time and patience,” Jonathan says at last, hair rumpled in a way that Arabella will sink her fingers into later, firelight glinting in his eyes. “They’re often less help than they appear to be, and they’re very difficult to keep still; like trying to carry water in a silk apron, I’ve sometimes felt.”

Arabella appreciates the explanation, the little gestures he makes while he speaks, so she gives him a moment before she responds: “so you’re saying that you _were_ in the habit, but are less so now.”

Jonathan laughs, not particularly ashamed of being caught in a half-truth, and his expression is mischievous and boyish in the way it still is for her, if not for the people outside. “Ah, Arabella,” he says, fond, “it is too much to hope I can prevaricate with you.”

Their home has been largely free of ghosts and spectral figures over the last few days, but now Arabella has acquired the ability to see them, she cannot seem to lose it again; for the most part they seem harmless, more confused and bored than malevolent, but it is still a shock to have a translucent person rising out of the piano when one is attempting to play.

“What else are you summoning that you ought not to be?” she asks; Jonathan shifts on their ottoman and lets the peacock feather drop and lies down so he can put his head in her lap and muddle up her knitting. Friends have suggested to Arabella that she get a cat or a little dog, as is so often the fashion, but at this point she has no need of one; not when she has her husband to do the office of nuisance-making all by himself.

“Nothing unearthly, my dear,” Jonathan tells her from his new spot, curls spread across the silk of her gown, eyes glittering bright and warm. “The books are very often quite clear on the sorts of peoples and creatures that one should absolutely not summon if one wants to live a peaceful life, or at least, not ruin any more of one’s wife’s curtains.”

Perhaps her husband is learning something other than magic after all.

“Are they full of dire warnings against calling up devils and in-laws, that sort of thing?” Arabella asks.

Jonathan laughs, exposing his slightly crooked teeth; spread out lax and passive and hers, as he can only ever be in moments like this. “Of course,” he replies. “But there are many more, of course; I have made a list so that I can be sure-”

“-that you’re crossing them off one by one when you eventually decide to stop behaving yourself?” Arabella suggests dryly.

A strange look flits across Jonathan’s face; something fragile and dark and unlike any expression she has ever seen on his face before. It’s gone before she has time to try and analyse it; a moment later she can imagine that it never occurred at all.

“Something like that,” he agrees, a moment too late, then grins up at her. “Of course, Arabella, I shall _always_ behave myself; your haberdashery is quite safe from me.”

“Falser words have never been spoken,” Arabella tells him, and swats at him until he tumbles out of her lap, laughing, and she can curl her fingers into his hair and tilt his head up to kiss him, just the two of them and their fireplace and no watching eyes at all.

**iii.**

They are having a quiet supper together at home; it’s something of a novelty, what with them being the most celebrated guests in London, it feels some days, and Jonathan’s sense of time is the first thing to vanish when he’s upstairs studying. Arabella doesn’t want or need to spend every waking minute with her husband, but it is nevertheless pleasant when they have time to themselves, when Jonathan isn’t half playing the part of some kind of stage magician, and Arabella isn’t talking to all the best women in town and playing her role as society wife as best she can.

They manage the entire first course all by themselves before the first spectre floats through the wall. Arabella recognises her; she’s the tired-looking young woman who mostly likes the first floor; sometimes they sit and talk while Arabella sews, and she’s far less morose than folktales would have Arabella believe. Still, there’s a time and a place for ghosts, and Arabella maintains that it is not during meals.

Their uninvited guest drifts through the table, making the candles gutter, but causing no other disturbance. 

Arabella sighs, and puts down her cutlery. “Sometimes,” she says, “I wish that you had taken up botany.”

Jonathan’s face crinkles, he screws up his nose. “ _Botany_ ,” he scoffs. “Dirt and thorns and rashes and strange smells and sunburn.”

She refrains from pointing out to him that botany is generally a quieter, safer pursuit that does not fill one’s home with ghosts, though admittedly the dinner conversation would be far less interesting; Arabella has never been particularly interested in flowers. Mostly, she just wanted Jonathan to have a focus; this result wasn’t exactly what she was expecting.

Instead of any of that, she says: “you came out with a rash that time you tried the spell in the purple book Norrell lent you, even though he told you not to.”

Jonathan continues to look like a discontented child. “It worked, though,” he says. “He didn’t like _that_.”

Norrell doesn’t like much of what Jonathan does, for all that he wishes to monopolise his time; sometimes Arabella looks at their ruined curtains and interrupted dinners and uninvited spectral houseguests and scorched ceilings and reflects that it is little wonder that none of the accounts of the great magicians in history include their wives. She is not particularly house proud, not all that invested in the perfection of her home, but she imagines it would drive someone differently inclined more than a little mad.

Jonathan is still looking like he’s about to argue about entirely the wrong aspects of this conversation, so Arabella decides to let him continue looking irritated about her botany comment and concentrate on solving the situation at hand.

“Katherine,” she says, drawing the attention of their ghost; “we have _discussed_ this.”

Katherine is easier to reason with than most of their home’s ghosts, and far easier to communicate with than the other apparitions Arabella is beginning to sense in other buildings. She assumes that her perception of the supernatural is growing as a result of her close proximity to a magician and his magic, and is still unable to pin down how she feels about this alteration to her world. On the one hand, there is something exciting about talking to the long dead; a spark of something thrilling that she cannot deny. On the other, of course, it is disquieting and inconvenient to discover just how _many_ shades of the deceased there are drifting about, causing distractions at the most inconvenient moments. A certain measure of eccentricity is expected in a magician’s wife, and Arabella is grateful for that lenience; it is not always easy to focus on conversations at parties when pale eerie figures are skimming around, treading in the punch bowl.

After a long moment, Katherine walks away, leaving the two of them alone once more. Arabella looks back to find her husband looking at her with brightly wide, proud eyes, glittering with candle flames and fondness and something that sparks warmth in her stomach.

“Botany?” he repeats, soft, and grins that grin that only belongs to her.

“Oh, be quiet,” Arabella murmurs, and fidgets with the edge of her napkin until he stops laughing.


End file.
